Las Vegas casino unveils multimillion-dollar art collection

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Las Vegas is no stranger to over-the-top gambling joints. But the Palms Casino Resort’s latest revamp is one for the books.

$620 million later, the Palms is practically a modern art museum, with millions of dollars worth of eye-popping work lining the walls.

Original pieces by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Prince give gamblers something more compelling to look at than their diminishing chip stacks.

The stunning Unknown bar at the casino’s center is built around British bad boy Damien Hirst’s 1999 sculpture “The Unknown (Explored, Explained, Exploded)” — a three-piece shark tank with a third of a dissected shark floating in each tank. (A similar piece, with just one shark in one tank, sold for $15,300,000 in 2008.) Hirst also designed the bar’s coasters, matchbooks and swizzle sticks.

The casino’s 36-year-old art curator, Tal Cooperman, joined the Palms soon after it was purchased for $312.5 million in 2016 by art collecting brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertita.

The former graffiti artist was originally hired to help design the Palms’ night spots, including its Apex Social Club, where a fantastic view of the Vegas Strip is rivaled by four life-size humanoid sculptures by Brooklyn’s Dustin Yellin, valued at around $150,000 each.

But when Cooperman showed himself to have a sharp eye for street art, the Fertitas shifted his focus.

“Frank and Lorenzo thought we should give people a chance to see stuff that is more niche,” Cooperman tells The Post. “They taught me a lot about blue-chip art and I’m bringing in ideas from the street.”

So, alongside a pair of Warhol’s “Dollar Sign (Quad)” screen prints behind the bar of Palms’ high-limit gambling enclave, Basquiat’s text-heavy “Speaks for Itself” triptych in Scotch 80 Prime steakhouse and Richard Prince’s pulp novel-inspired “Nurse in Las Vegas” at the Camden Cocktail Lounge, there is edgy work by the likes of Kaws, Eric Haze and Crash (who got his start painting graffiti on New York subways cars).

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